Kevin Williamson writes What to Do About Wages in The National Review.

Excerpts:

The Left sees inequality as a cause of economic facts, not an effect of them. As EPI sees things, inequality is an independent actor, a motive force in world affairs: It is not only a “determinant” of economic conditions but “by far the most important determinant”; it has, under its own steam, “blocked living standards growth for the vast majority”; and it is “the key driver behind stagnant wages for workers at the bottom.” This is a deeply weird view of how the world actually works: The Left thinks that inequality is not a mere measure of relative incomes or wealth but something that does things in the world, something that acts — and not only acts but acts decisively, determining Americans’ economic prospects. This sort of flatly preposterous analysis is the unfortunate effect of mistaking the map for the territory and the model for the thing modeled, the kind of magical thinking that causes people to believe that Superman could turn back time by reversing the rotation of the Earth.

That leads to the sort of silly writing exemplified above, but it also leads to bad policy ideas. EPI is about as respectable an economic-policy outfit as the Left has to offer, but its preferred policy responses to wage stagnation are basically primitive: raising minimum wages, as though long-term prosperity could be brought about by congressional fiat; passing paid-sick-leave laws; and changing corporate governance and financial regulation in ways that would impede or discourage income growth among corporate managers and financial professionals, who along with the occasional professional athlete and movie star make up the top 1 percent. There is more magical thinking in that, too: There is no big bucket of “national income,” and $100,000 in forgone pay for a CEO or private-equity investors does not mean that there is an extra $100,000 sitting around available to be used as income for somebody else. We talk about the “distribution” of income, but that is a purely statistical idea. There is no distributor of income, and income cannot simply be moved from one pocket to another like wampum.

print